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Sunday, August 14, 2011

On talking about being a fashion researcher.

Valerie Steele told us this great story during the question time after her talk last Friday. Whilst she was a grad student at Yale, she attended a cocktail event where a senior academic asked her what she was researching for her PhD. When she replied, "fashion", he reacted enthusiastically, "Oh, how interesting! German or Italian?"

She recalled feeling puzzled: "Italian fashion- you know, I thought of Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, Gucci- but German fashion? Is he talking about Lagerfeld, Jil Sander...?"

Then the penny dropped.

"Not fascism," she replied. "Fashion."

The senior academic looked at her blankly, before turning on his heel and walking away. "And that was the end of the conversation!"

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ROSIE

I kept Fashademic while I was a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, conducting my research on personal style blogs. My degree was awarded in September 2014. You can read my thesis, "O HAI GUYZ: Between Personal Style Bloggers, Their Readers, and Modern Fashion" by clicking the link in Press. Fashademic was totes a methodological exercise.